After 31 issues, Marvel Comics’ adaptation of Stephen King’s epic The Stand comes to an end. The Dark Man, Randall Flagg, has been defeated in Las Vegas, and the survivors of the holocaust are making their way home. But Stu Redman and Tom Cullen may have a horrible surprise waiting for them when they arrive.

As an epilogue to this adaptation of the novel, this issue caps things off fairly well. We see the final fates of our main characters, or at least as final a fate as the novel gives us, and we get the hint that the bad times are going to come again, as they usually do.

As always, though, this adaptation has come very much as the expense of telling a solid story. From the beginning, this version of the story has been heavy with the captions and exposition in a way that’s perfectly acceptable if you’re reading a novel but doesn’t work at all in a graphic format. The finale is just as wordy and bloated as the rest of the series to date.

It’s a shame, because Mike Perkins and Laura Martin’s artwork handles this story so well. They perfectly get across all of the emotion and drama of the story, and while some of the details may not quite be possible to get across without words, it would be so much more effective to use those words sparingly.

The Stand, the novel, is one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature. This adaptation has never really succeeded in actually adapting, instead retelling the story, often word-for-word. It could have gone so much better.